Oil prices continue to rise in part because the demand for oil continues to grow, while stable sources of oil are becoming scarcer. Oil companies continue to develop new tools for generating data from boreholes with the hope of leveraging such data by converting it into meaningful information that may lead to improved production, reduced costs, and/or streamlined operations.
The measured data may be communicated to the surface through mud pulse telemetry techniques, in which drilling fluid or “mud” is used as a propagation medium for a signal wave, such as a pressure wave, and one or more features of the wave is/are modulated to represent the recorded digital data. As the wave propagates to the surface, these modulations may be detected and a demodulator at the surface can reconstruct the digital data.
As logging tools increase in sophistication, so too does the volume of logging data they record. Accordingly, telemetry must keep pace or it may become a bottleneck for real-time data acquisition and/or quality data transmission.